A review by daiinty
All's Well by Mona Awad

dark emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

“We all fall, Ms. Fitch. We fall and we rise. Bones and tissue heal. But sometimes we want to hold on to the pain. Sometimes we have our reasons for not being able to let go.” — Mona Awad

mona awad has done it once again. another five star read. i honestly was brought back to my english major days with how many annotations i made for this book. i feel like i could write a whole essay, and this may become a mini one. i think what i found most fascinating about this book was the character’s relation to each of the plays: macbeth and all’s well that ends well. miranda is constantly nostalgic for her role as helen because what she ultimately desires is to be seen in rhetorical same way helen is finally seen at the end of the play. this is why she pushes so hard for all’s well to be put on. miranda’s rejection of macbeth makes sense once it is revealed that it was during her role as lady macbeth that she took her career ending fall. there indeed many parallels between miranda and helen, in particular miranda’s powerful touch. this touch, however, is the opposite of helen’s healing touch, for it heals miranda but bestows her pain onto whomever she grasps. we then see how miranda starts to seek out pain that she no longer feels since she had been defined by her pain for so long. her obsession with her red poppy dress harkens back to helen’s act one dress. 

further parallels are found, however, between miranda and macbeth. we see her association with the “weird brethren” and immediately macbeth comes to mind. macbeth was in a way “given” (or rather took as miranda does) what he desired by the weird sisters, but it ultimately becomes his demise. in the end, miranda has lost all empathy and sense of reality, and is quoting macbeth’s final lines before he dies just before she takes her second fall off of the stage. 

the ending for miranda is very open however. i love how perfectly awad writes the unreliable narrator because throughout this novel we are never sure what is real and what is imagined. the open ending of the novel really cements that for us.